The new Luna Park, named after a previous theme park at Coney Island, opened Memorial Day weekend to largely good reviews.

Not all of the rides were up and running, but Coney Island’s resurrected theme-park attraction opened over Memorial Day weekend to rave reviews and considerable fanfare.

The press gave Luna Park high marks for its debut. NY1 said the theme park’s construction, which took just 100 days, was “a miraculous feat.” (See a time-lapse video of the construction below.) The New York Post called Luna Park a “cash cow,” and various Coney Island businesses told the newspaper that their profits “were through the roof compared to the same period last year.”

One Luna Park visitor recalled when the same the location was “a ghost town” in the Daily News report. “Now it’s packed with lines all over.”

But it wasn’t all plaudits. Three early reviews on Yelp were more mixed, with one opening weekend critic noting only the tame, child-appropriate rides are open and issuing demerits for Luna Park’s inexperienced staff: “[O]n multiple occasions staff were seen bickering and yelling at each other,” Yelp user John D. noted. Read More »

Co-op City building workers march near the massive housing complex in the Bronx on Tuesday.

Hundreds of Co-op City apartment building workers walked off the job as their contracts expired Tuesday, leaving one of the nation’s largest housing developments without its garbage attendants, porters, maintenance staff and groundskeepers.

The workers, armed with whistles, signs and cowbells, shouted “no contract, no work!” as they marched through the Bronx neighborhood on a scorching hot day.

The standoff between the RiverBay Corporation and SEIU’s Local 32BJ chapter — which affects almost 60,000 people — stems from the union’s displeasure with RiverDay’s proposal of slightly higher wages and a reduced health care plan for 500 workers.

“We’re basically at a place where they’re asking us to choose between feeding our families and keeping them healthy,” said Alexander Vargas, who’s worked as a groundskeeper for 19 years. “It’d be great if we could do both.”

Vargas, who attended negotiations last week, said the health-care aspect of the contract is critical to him, as he has a 7-year-old daughter with a heart condition. “She was having an EKG done while we were negotiating table,” he said, “so this is a real thing for me.”

Vernon Cooper, RiverBay’s general manager, said the company’s offer was fair. What the union wants in terms of health care “is more than we can afford,” he said. He added that the proposed yearly 2.33% wage increases for the next four years were on par with what the Realty Advisory Board, which oversees hundreds of residences in New York City, gave its workers in April.

Until a deal is reached, RiverBay Corp. will hire contractors to handle work done by the employees. Additionally, it has asked the city’s health department to declare the situation an emergency, which would allow more frequent trash pickups during the standoff. “Things could obviously get pretty ugly if those things weren’t done by someone,” said RiverBay general manager Vernon Cooper, adding that twice-a-week trash pickups wouldn’t be sufficient for the interim. Read More »

Cars entering Manhattan’s central business district on work days create traffic, and that traffic costs money. But it’s not just the motorists stuck in gridlock who pay; all New Yorkers affected by traffic delays end up paying the bill in lost time, road repairs and air pollution.

The value of time lost to traffic is no airy concept. According to the work of Charles Komanoff, the presence of every car in Manhattan has a dollar value: $128 worth of lost time.

Just who is this Manhattan traffic guru? “He’s a traffic expert who has taken up the Borgesian task of re-creating, in precise detail, the economic and environmental impact of every single car, bus, truck, taxi, train, subway, bicycle, and pedestrian moving around New York City,” in the words of writer (and Reuters finance blogger) Felix Salmon.

The math behind that calculation isn’t easy, but you can follow along in an illuminating profile of Komanoff in the latest issue of Wired magazine. The variables that go into computing the time value are themselves a fascinating dissection of city life: a taxi passenger and a car-driving commuter are assigned different values in Komanoff’s intricate system.

And you can go further: the massive spreadsheet that allowed Komanoff to quantify the value of time lost in traffic and the burden created by every sort of vehicle and person coming into Manhattan is available online. Anyone can change Komanoff’s numerical assumptions and draw their own conclusions.

Komanoff, a bicycle devotee (he also keeps a spreadsheet of all his bike trips) and congestion pricing advocate, outlines two ways to implement his findings. Read More »

Miguel Cotto, left, and Yuri Foreman square off at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, June 5.

As the Journal’s Sophia Hollander reports, Saturday’s boxing match between Yuri Foreman and Miguel Cotto at Yankee Stadium is a modern rehash of an old ethnic rivalry: the Puerto Rican favorite, Cotto, against the Orthodox Jewish upstart, Foreman.

Recently, that rivalry has reared its head at the Manhattan office of the New York Department of State, where Puerto Rican and Jewish employees have been talking some serious trash. Most deeply involved in this friendly, inter-office exchange are Lorraine Cortes-Vazquez, the Secretary of State, and Joel Barkin, the deputy secretary of state for public affairs.

Since the fight was announced several months ago, Cortes-Vazquez, who is Puerto Rican-American, and Barkin, who is Jewish, have been going toe-to-toe, teasing each other about the fight, taping photos of Cotto or Foreman to each others’ desks and even making a friendly wager.

If Cotto prevails this weekend, “he’s going to have to eat Puerto Rican food for at least a week,” Cortes-Vazquez said of Barkin.

And if Foreman wins?

“She’ll have to eat at Katz’s” said Barkin, referring to the kosher-style deli on the Lower East Side. Read More »

Consider the lobster roll: fresh chunks of buttery lobster, gingerly laced with mayo (not too much) and piled high into a pillowy, just-toasted, top-split roll. Some add celery, Old Bay or chives, but everyone agrees the crustacean should do the heavy lifting.

It is the very essence of a moneyed summer in New England – a Pottery Barn beach cottage catalog wrapped in a hot dog bun. But because your average New Yorker spends their summer not in the Cape but sweating bullets in Midtown, the lobster roll has become a mainstay of summer meals in the city.

There’s a New Yorker furtively scarfing one down in the back of the Chelsea Market; here’s another, carefully cutting one into fours at the elegant Lure Fishbar. Here’s a Mets fan mowing one down at Citi Field; there’s a Brooklyn dad handing baby a bite at the Brooklyn Flea. Luke’s Lobster has opened a second branch on the Upper East Side, and next weekend, dining newsletter Tasting Table will hold a competitive lobster roll tasting, or “claw-off” with eight participating restaurants.

The bill would allow drivers to double park when they are picking up or dropping off passengers, or if a parking space is about to become vacant.

Fed up with what they see as a rapid increase in ticketing across the city, three City Council members plan to introduce legislation this week that would legalize double parking in certain situations, the New York Post reports.

The bill would allow drivers to double park when they are picking up or dropping off passengers, or if a parking space is about to become vacant. It does not specify how long drivers would be permitted to double park and it would not allow drivers to leave their vehicles.

In 2002, parking enforcement wrote roughly 806,000 tickets citywide for double parking, the Post reports. That number has increased every year since, rising to 1.3 million during the last fiscal year.

“They [the ticketing agents] are going around and playing gotcha with people,” Vincent Gentile (D-Brooklyn), who is introducing the bill, said in an interview with the Post. Read More »

New Yorkers may someday be forced to consider alternate uses for MetroCards.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will take a step Monday toward replacing the MetroCard with a new, tap-and-go payment system. The agency, along with MasterCard, NJ Transit and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will begin testing a system that would let bus and subway riders tap a device on a reader instead of swiping a card, much as riders in London, Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong have been doing for years. Second Avenue Sagas and AM New York have details about what the pilot, which is being offered on some bus lines and the Lexington Avenue subway.

But what’s really important here is the end goal: replacing the MetroCard by 2014. That has been a pet project of MTA Chief Executive Jay Walder, who helped implement London’s Oyster Card, which works as an all-purpose transit card. Walder repeatedly points to the 15 cents per dollar that it costs the MTA to collect fares, and says a tap-and-go card, which auto-refills from users’ bank or credit card accounts, could reduce that expense. (Walder is fond of asking people what other technology in their pocket or in their homes dates to the 1980s, which is when the MetroCard was developed.) Read More »

Over the past two years, the so-called Chinatown bus has begun offering routes beyond the East Coast.

But this past Memorial Day weekend, travelers looking for an inexpensive shuttle to, say, Birmingham, Ala. or Chicago, Ill. could also have taken the Chinatown bus.

As the New York Observer reports, over the past two years, various Chinatown bus services have expanded their reach beyond the East Coast, sometimes offering cheaper fares and faster routes than their counterparts at Greyhound and Peter Pan.

For instance, a round-trip bus ticket leaving from Allen Street in Manhattan going to Richmond, Va. this week costs $60 on Eastern Travel, one of the Chinatown bus companies. The same ride costs close to $100 on Greyhound.

For other fares, the price disparity is negligible. A Chinatown bus to Dayton Ohio, leaving tomorrow, costs $190 round trip. That’s the same price as Greyhound. The difference: the Greyhound trip is roughly four hours longer, according to the travel times listed on various websites. Read More »